My brother and I were greeted by a loud hum when we rolled up to Lafayette Square Mall’s Shoppers World. Two large generators sat near the loading docks, while a sign inside said the restrooms were unavailable. Apparently, the last store at Indianapolis’ otherwise-empty mall was running on its own! Surrounded by about 800,000 square feet of vacant retail and fifty acres of parking, it’s crazy that the place remains open.
Lafayette Square opened in 1968 as the Indianapolis area’s first enclosed shopping mall. Decades of changing retail habits, closures, crime, and disinvestment eventually renamed the place “Lafayette Scare1” in the public’s eye, which sent it into a long decline. Locally-owned Sojos Capital bought the property in 2021 and announced an ambitious $200 million redevelopment called “Window to the World.”
The mall still had tenants when it closed in September 2022, supposedly to accelerate renovations2. It was expected to reopen that November3, but never did. Nearly four years later, Shoppers World’s exterior entrance provides access to the last store. I decided to visit, but my familiarity with the chain mostly came from a 2016 Undercover Boss episode featuring CEO Sam Dushey. He encountered everything from nonexistent store security and overloaded seasonal departments to bad Wi-Fi and a sizable gap between corporate expectations and what employees actually dealt with.
Aside from that, what I knew was that Shoppers World was a cross between a discount department store and off-price retailer, all wrapped up in someone else’s old big box. As a matter of fact, that’s what happened here in 2008, when Shoppers World opened its first Indiana store inside Lafayette Square’s old J.C. Penney4. Two years later, another Shoppers World opened at Felbram Plaza North in a spot once home to Ayr-Way and Target5. Indy’s third is at Esquire Plaza in an anchor space that used to be a Del Farm supermarket6 and, later, Preston-Safeway77. The Lafayette Square Shoppers World moved from J.C. Penney to the empty Burlington store in 20208.
I wouldn’t say Shoppers World was popping when John and I rolled up, but there were about twenty cars in the parking lot, along with two county mounties parked near the mall’s old main entrance and another pair that sped in just as we circled. Once we went inside, what greeted us were long aisles, simple signage, tight racks, and merchandise that seemed arranged more around category and inventory levels than planned presentation. It was like a nicer Buyers Market or Roses, but we noted no checkouts in sight.
Shoppers World’s men’s department faced the main entrance. John and I went through it and passed art, assorted household goods, beauty products, bedding, cookware, curtains, dishes, furniture, home décor, luggage, rugs, seasonal merchandise, small appliances, towels, and toys. John spied a seven-dollar bug-zapping tennis racket!! Still, more interesting than the merchandise were the traces of stores that came before it: a pair of covered escalators still cut through the sales floor, leftovers not from Burlington but from Montgomery Ward -and, before that, Lazarus- which built the 148,000-square-foot store in 19749.
The overall atmosphere of Lafayette Square’s Shoppers World was no-frills and bargain-oriented. Prices and selection clearly mattered more than polish! It’s closer in spirit to the discount department stores of decades past like Value City or Gabriel Brothers than to today’s highly standardized big-box chains like Kohl’s, Belk, or Dillard’s. Another old escalator caught my attention too, so we circled for a photo before we hit the check-out.
Bizarrely, Shoppers World’s move into the old Burlington/Ward/Lazarus space didn’t bring the checkouts with it to the exterior entrance. Instead, a single queue fed eight registers lined up beside the sealed-off mall entrance, nearly all the way across the store from the doors we’d used. I’m told that’s for loss prevention purposes.
The old mall entrance was covered up, of course, and I took a quick photo as a Shoppers World worker was engaged in something right in the middle of it. I detected some brightness coming in from a skylight above the inline court on the other side, but my camera accidentally focused on the plastic cart and box right in front of it as I haphazardly framed the shot. What a bummer!
As John paid for his bug-zapping racket and a pack of clumped-together Junior Mints, the cashier did something I’d never seen before: she taped the shopping bag handle together. Whether or not that was intended to prevent additional merchandise from finding its way inside during the long walk to the exit, I don’t know, but another employee in a safety-green vest checked John’s receipt against the sack’s contents before releasing us into the pitted, overgrown parking lot.
On our way out, John and I found another old escalator cover-up. I’m not sure that this store featured a second story since the Montgomery Ward days! The escalators probably seem like random walls for those who frequent Shoppers World, but their purpose was evident to John and me. One day, I’d love to climb up to the second story.
I’m not sure how much longer Shoppers World will last at Lafayette Square. Sojos has already replaced its “Window to the World” concept with another ambitious redevelopment called “The Square,” which would demolish much of the old mall in favor of a different mixture of housing, dining, offices, education, sports, and entertainment areas10. After five years of plans and relatively little visible progress, I’ll believe all that when I see it.
Still, Shoppers World keeps plugging along for now. The generators hum outside, old escalators have disappeared above the sales floor, and customers still line up at registers beside an entrance that hasn’t led to a functioning mall in nearly four years. It’s a strange existence for the last retail remnant of what was once Indianapolis’ premier shopping center, but that’s exactly why I wanted to see it.
Sources Cited
1 Cierzniak, L. (2025, December 14). The rise, fall and reinvention of defunct mall. The Indianapolis Star. p. A11…